I woke up Sunday to a voice mail from my dad, asking if I could maybe shave off some time and get to Saltillo a little earlier than I had planned. “Your mom’s having a bad time,” he said. “She needs her spirits lifted.”
Lately the quality of my mother’s days varies wildly, usually depending on how well she’s been able to police herself and not, as we say, “overdo it” during the previous few days. Overdoing it for my mother is staying up all night, maybe not going to bed at all. Overdoing it for my mother is spending all day and into the night in her beloved flowerbeds, trying to plant and shape and craft and prune and weed and move and split and perfect. Overdoing it for my mother is letting her mind go to the dark place it likes to visit every now and again.
The good days are wonderful but the bad days? I’ll be honest. I’m not around much for the bad days. It’s a blessing and a curse to live these two hours from her. I don’t get to see her, monitor how she’s doing, listen to her when she just needs to rattle, make her laugh, do the heavy lifting. And I don’t get to see her when she is in so much pain that she cannot leave the bed. For two days.
I hear about it sometimes, often in my dad’s tone of voice on the phone or in his eyes when I do get to come home. He’s grown weary of certain patterns of behavior and the domino effect they have. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m sorry it’s not easy, but that he has always told me that life isn’t easy. That seems like a callous thing to say, or even think. But I don’t know how to make it better for him. When I’m there he seems so short with her. She seems to take it in good stride, and even joked about it with him. I know his attitude comes from a place of fear for her well-being. And I have never really been able to read tension between my parents accurately. When I was a kid, I would absolutely fall apart every time they argued. I am decidedly un-kid now, and when there is tension between my parents, I feel physically ill.
Mom showed me her hands Sunday evening. Swollen and dirt-stained, they carried nicks and calluses from her ungloved battles with plants. “I have an obsession,” she told me, referring to her habit of weeding at all hours. If she is standing outside long enough, she will go to pulling. Even if she’s not in her own yard. I told her she had to take it easy. I know she feels rushed by the natural current of spring and how a gardener knows certain things have to be done at certain times and with certain amounts of repetition, but she has got to learn her limits and then stop short of them. Every time.
She led me through the yard, asking me if I had any of this, any of that, and uprooting what she thought I might like to take with me. We went to the basement, where she had attempted to winter over lots of her finest greenery, and she admitted to me, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this next year.” I saw why. Once we stepped outside, the garage was flanked by enormous pots of elephant ears and plants taller than any living human carrying Turner blood. The woman needs a greenhouse of her own (my grandmother’s is full and quite old). My dad, ever the loving husband who wants to give his bride whatever she needs, has been plotting and scheming to get one built despite the overall gloomy financial outlook for a one-income household.
As I watched my mom look over the orchestra of plants she had been nursing for years and years, choosing which ones to pass on to me, I realized that she is passing a torch to me. Not using her lit candle to light my candle, but handing me the whole candle and saying, “Here. You keep this lit. My hands won’t even make a fist anymore.” And I can’t tell you what an emotional gutcheck that is to me. Holding court over her flowers has brought her such joy in her life. She has filled every nook and cranny of the homestead with shape and color. Trees she planted when I was a kid are now taller than the house. She has named some of these plants, and addresses them by name, as they are somewhat fickle like humans. And here she is, confronting the reality that the upkeep is just too much for her. My heart hurts for her.
But now I understand why she just falls all over herself to help me get my yard in order, why she wants to populate it with the same plants she and my dad and my grandmother have been looking after for as long as they can remember. These little pieces of all that hard work need to live on. And I’m proud to give them life for as long as I’m able.
lins, i’ve known you for a good minute now and read a ton of stuff you’ve written, and this is honestly the most touching thing i’ve read from anyone in a very very long time. i can’t describe what it makes me feel. i just want to say thank you.
This is downright awesome, this is the best you have ever written, IMO.
Thank you both. So much. This was cathartic but also really tough to write.
Oh My God love you Linz. It is October 23 and I have just now stumbled upon this, yet another wonderful and intellectual and articulate and bright and oh-so-if-not-from-your-parents-then-where-the-heck-did-you-get-it site. And I am so moved; no, not moved but more like blown away over the end of the garden and down the hill (weeding a little, of course, along the way). I guess I had no idea these moments were being inhaled, internalized, tucked away in your sweet memory to flurry to the forefront of your consciousness again and again…whenever you plant the tiny seeds that promise to grow into a splendor of color…what serendipity when the acorn you noticed had sent up the shoot that would someday be a 70-foot-tall tree…or when you feel the zeal when the seeds you thought would never come up suddenly become tiny droplets of green just above the soil…or when you water that big overgrown but gorgeous blooming thing that you cannot, for the life of you, remember the name of…the exhilaration that any time and many times you will be blessed by the beauty and grandeur of a flower. Or greenery. Just remember it is we who tend it as best we can, but it is God who made it for our enjoyment and care…just one of the many blessings He has bestowed upon us. And what an awesome thought it is that He has entrusted us to care for and appreciate and breathe in the beauty of His handiwork. And that, my love, is breathtaking for sure. It is also very hard to write this for barely being able to see through the tears, and after having read your bittersweet commentary. Another thing of beauty. I love you, precious daughter. And thank you. –Mom
I absolutely do not know what made me stumble upon your blog, and especially as close in date to which mom found it as well! I am ever so grateful I did! I don’t think anyone, no I KNOW that noone could have depicted our mother as respectfully, graciously, and ever more beautiful than you, her daughter summed up in these paragraphs. Who knew that the descriptive detail, but yet the basic simplicity of just a glimpse inside our mother’s heart, mind, soul and lively hood could be wrapped in such a cleansing spirit and ultimate power of emotional breakdown? Ha, not me, and I have been entwined in that womans life for 37 years. I think I shun away the importance of foliage to mom, not realizing that this is her personal gift back to her world as she knows it, the greenery as the focus of her dimmer switch, and the flowers as the focus of the colors of her ever changing kalidescope and the way she combines them all into her own rainbow of living. Her mind boggles me. It facinates me. She is not capable of harm. She is exceptional. She is my mother. I have this burned image in my mind of her hands, nails and cuticles stained from her continued “abuse” to struggle to dig and dig and dig deeper into the soil that is her link to sanity. No one understands her struggles. Her days of passive awareness of her illness taking its toll upon her worn body and mind versuses the days of aggressive attitude and withstanding faith totally mesmerize me. She stayed by my bedside this summer when my own light was dimmed, never faltering, not ONCE, and as I sit here and relive the day I was released from ICU, and into a regular room, I sat in my hospital bed, looked outside at the trees, and started to cry. I was soooo happy not only to be alive, but that I got a second chance to see my momma’s beautiful green eyes once more. SHE was the one that was there beside me when the doctor gave the news that I may “not make it”. SHE was there the day of my birth, and almost the day of my death. She nurtured me much like her flowers, tending to me carefully, and applying her own touch. A mother’s touch. I take for granted that I am still lucky enough to have her with me, given her “rambling, 20 page texts, gomminess, and all OCD’s” combined. You have inherited her gift of writing and knowing what tweak to put on her words. You posess dad’s ability to characterize and capture mom’s rambunctious behavior, but also his witty charm and obvious overflowing love for his bride, your mother. I thank you too, my sweet, beautiful little sister, for placing our mother in her own category of unrecognized strength and beauty, with much likeness to her beautiful flowers that came from a bed once filled with weeds. I love you more than words could ever say, emotion could ever show, or tears could fill a cup, and I am ever thankful to call you my sister, my friend. Again, “my cup runneth over”…..*Krissie*
I am not very great with English but I line up this really easy to read .